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Updated postgresql84 and postgresql packages that fix two security issuesare now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6 respectively.

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having moderatesecurity impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores,which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerabilityfrom the CVE links in the References section.

A flaw was found in the way the crypt() password hashing function from theoptional PostgreSQL pgcrypto contrib module performed passwordtransformation when used with the DES algorithm. If the password string tobe hashed contained the 0x80 byte value, the remainder of the string wasignored when calculating the hash, significantly reducing the passwordstrength. This made brute-force guessing more efficient as the wholepassword was not required to gain access to protected resources.(CVE-2012-2143)

Note: With this update, the rest of the string is properly included in theDES hash; therefore, any previously stored password values that areaffected by this issue will no longer match. In such cases, it will benecessary for those stored password hashes to be updated.

A denial of service flaw was found in the way the PostgreSQL serverperformed a user privileges check when applying SECURITY DEFINER or SETattributes to a procedural language's (such as PL/Perl or PL/Python) callhandler function. A non-superuser database owner could use this flaw tocause the PostgreSQL server to crash due to infinite recursion.(CVE-2012-2655)

Upstream acknowledges Rubin Xu and Joseph Bonneau as the original reportersof the CVE-2012-2143 issue.

These updated packages upgrade PostgreSQL to version 8.4.12, which fixesthese issues as well as several non-security issues. Refer to thePostgreSQL Release Notes for a full list of changes: